[Qemu-devel] Windows 2000 disk full problem during install...

[Qemu-devel] Windows 2000 disk full problem during install...

[Leo Whitman]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone had a chance to look into this problem more.  
I've done a great deal of research myself on it so far, but do not yet 
have a solution.  Most of the c:\winnt\security\edb*.log files that fill 
up the disk are created during the hardware scan stage in the GUI 
portion of the install.  I'm using Windows 2000 Professional, on QEMU 
0.6.2 (latest from CVS) and have encountered the problem on any flavor 
of Linux I try.

I did try to set the disk geometry manually with -hdacs to 
<tracks>/16/63.  This helped a bit - basically delayed the disk filling 
up until later in the hardware scan.  Without this parameter, the log 
files fill the disk pretty much right at the beginning of the hardware scan.

I also tried a small patch to hw/ide.c (without the multithread bits) , 
from Vladimir N. Oleynik.  Basically only the s->status is set to 
READY_STAT instead of READY_STAT | SEEK_STAT in/around hw/ide.c:1472 
from that patch.  This did not solve the problem at all.

I'm willing to keep investigating the problem, but was wondering if any 
others had ideas in the meantime.

Thank you,

Leo Whitman

[Qemu-devel] Re: Windows 2000 disk full problem during install...

[Janusz S. Bień]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004  Leo Whitman <whit74@verbmail.com> wrote:

[...]

> I'm willing to keep investigating the problem, but was wondering if
> any others had ideas in the meantime.

I will be glad to help by making some tests.

I am a novice user of QEMU, my main purpose is to use under Debian a
MS Windows commercial dictionary. I made about 10 attempts to install
Windows 2000 under Knoppix-based Debian, experimenting also with
different formats of disk images. 

My experiments were rather chaotic, but I was totally confused by the
fact the the installation process behaved in a semi-random way. Once I
got very far in the installation which failed in a definitely
different way then other attempts.

I am sorry to say that the following passage at
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html

        3.11.2.3 Windows 2000 disk full problems

        Currently (release 0.6.0) QEMU has a bug which gives a disk
        full error during installation of some releases of Windows
        2000. The workaround is to stop QEMU as soon as you notice
        that your disk image size is growing too fast (monitor it with
        ls -ls). Then relaunch QEMU to continue the installation. If
        you still experience the problem, relaunch QEMU again.

is not explicit enough for a novice like me (especially because I know
very little about MS Windows, before OpenOffice I used it to print
Word files, now I don't use it at all). In particular I don't know how
to avoid restarting Windows installation from the very beginning after
the relaunch of QEMU.

At the moment I have a usable dictionary under Debian Sarge qemu
0.6.0.dfsg.2-1, but it is not the dictionary I really want. One of the
problems I encountered is described at

        http://www.dad-answers.com/qemu-forum/viewtopic.php?t=145&sid=a595248431ff0e2f0987b001cbd2bf4c

but this is of course another thread.

Best regard

Janusz

-- 
                     ,   
dr hab. Janusz S. Bien, prof. UW -  Uniwersytet Warszawski (Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej)
Prof. Janusz S. Bien - Warsaw Uniwersity (Chair of Formal Linguistics)
jsbien@mimuw.edu.pl, jsbien@uw.edu.pl, http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~jsbien/, http://www.klf.uw.edu.pl